Senior Kernel Engineer: Systems, Networking
New York, NY

Job Description

Have you ever wondered what happens inside the cloud?

Based in New York, DigitalOcean is a dynamic, high-growth technology company that serves a robust and passionate community of developers, teams, and businesses around the world. We believe that today's entrepreneurs are changing the world through software. Our mission is to empower these entrepreneurs by bringing modern app development within reach for any developer, anywhere in the world.

We want people who are passionate about designing and operating secure systems at scale.

DigitalOcean is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Senior Engineer with a strong background in Kernel level networking. Systems Engineers at DigitalOcean are the glue between software and infrastructure engineering. They are responsible for driving cross functional work across all parts of our software and systems stack, ensuring that services are healthy, secure and performant.

Reporting to the Performance and Kernel Team Manager, the Senior Kernel Engineer will drive our Systems level networking mission. He/she will be focused on working with internal teams to improve and optimize systems level networking and drive future architectural networking designs. He/she will also work in the kernel community and will influence mission critical networking work upstream.

What You'll Be Doing:

* Scale one of the fastest growing cloud companies in the world
* Solve challenging software and hardware performance optimizations problems across the virtualization stack
* Improve all aspects of reliability, including monitoring, availability, and documentation
* Design and develop new systems with an emphasis on minimized maintenance requirements, as well as maintain and enhance existing systems.
* Systems analysis design and debugging of new systems.
* Work with outstanding teams to improve tools, processes, and the software they support
* Managing capacity, designing systems architecture and performing technology refreshes
* Participate in production readiness reviews and provide feedback to engineering teams on best practices.
* Automate error-prone tasks to drive safety and determinism throughout complex distributed systems
* Debug mission critical problems in production
* Provide architecture and scaling guidance where necessary for all engineering teams
* Develop modules to communicate with various systems such as network devices, storage farms and servers
* Customize and optimize DO's virtualization stack which includes: kernel, kvm, qemu, libvirt and OVS
* Contribute to open source communities, including (but not limited to): linux kernel, qemu, libvirt and OVS

What We'll Expect From You:

* Linux kernel expertise and upstream contribution
* Experience as a software engineer, developer, or systems programmer in a large scale, distributed environment.
* Experience writing secure, testable and robust object-oriented code.
* Deep understanding of operating systems, virtualization, Linux internals, security and networking including Open vSwitch (OVS)
* A track record of measurement, analysis, and critical technical problem solving in a fast-paced environment
* Experience proactively addressing software and systems reliability issues across all layers in the stack with the capacity to troubleshoot across network, database, OS & code as needed.
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills
* An aim to design and build large, distributed systems
* A dedication to solve problems and deliver solutions

Why You'll Like Working for DigitalOcean:

* We have amazing people. We can promise you will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We work hard but we always have fun doing it. We care deeply about each other and take our "no jerks" rule very seriously.
* We value development. We are a high-performance organization that is always challenging ourselves to continuously grow. That means we maintain a growth mindset in everything we do and invest deeply in employee development. You'll need to be great to get hired here and we promise you'll get even better.
* We care about you. We offer competitive health, dental, and vision benefits for employees and their dependents, a monthly gym reimbursement to support your physical health, and a monthly commute allowance to make your trips to and from work easier.
* We invest in your future. We offer competitive compensation and a 401k plan with up to a 4% employer match. We also provide all employees with Kindles and reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
* We want you to love where you work. We have great office spaces located in the heart of SoHo NYC and Cambridge and offer daily catered lunches to keep your hunger at bay. We're also very remote-friendly-we use Slack to communicate across the company-and all remote employees have the opportunity to onboard in-office and take an all-expenses paid trip to our annual company offsite, Shark Week, to get quality in-person time with the team at least once a year. We also allow employees to customize their workstations to meet their needs-whether remote or in office.
* We value diversity and inclusivity. We are an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Department: Engineering

Want to learn more about our Engineering team? Clickhere!

Want an inside look into life at DO? Clickhere to hear from our employees!